Category Archives: 60 Minutes Archive

Andy Rooney Gets Heavy – The Military Industrial Complex Has Taken Over The U.S. – Military-Industrial Complex Speech, Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961

This is from the October 2, 2005 program of
60 Minutes.
This contains the “Military-Industrial Complex Speech” by Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1961.
Andy Rooney’s really a stand up guy! One of the few on television these days to have the courage to tell it like it is.

Video – Andy Rooney On The Military Industrial Complex Taking Over The U.S. (6 MB)

Audio – Andy Rooney On The Military Industrial Complex Taking Over The U.S. (MP3 4 MB)
Dwight D. Eisenhower:
“We must guard against the aquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disasterous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist.”
Andy: “Well, Ike was right. That’s just what’s happened.”




Complete Transcription:

I’m not really clear about how much a billion dollars is. But the United States, our United States, is spending five billion, six hundred million dollars a month ($5,600,000,000.00) fighting this war in Iraq that we never should have gotten into. We still have 139,000 soldiers in Iraq today. Almost 2,000 Americans have died there. For what?
Now, we have the hurricanes to pay for. One way that our government pays for a lot of things is by borrowing from countries like China. Another way the government is planning on paying for the war and the hurricane damage is by cutting spending for things like medicare perscriptions, highway construction, farm payments, Amtrak, national public radio, loans to graduate students. Do these sound like things you’d like to cut back on to pay for Iraq?
I’ll tell you where we ought to start saving, on our bloated military establishment. We’re paying for weapons we’ll never use. No other country spends the kind of money we spend on our military. Last year, Japan spent $42 billion dollars, Italy spent $28 billion dollars, Russia spent only $19 billion. The United States spent $455 billion. We have 8,000 tanks, for example. One Abrams tank costs 150 times as much as a Ford stationwagon. We have more than 10,000 nuclear weapons. Enough to destroy all of mankind. We’re spending $200 million dollars a year on bullets alone. That’s a lot of target practice.
We have 1,155,000 enlisted men and women, and 225,000 officers. One officer to tell every five enlisted soldiers what to do. We have 40,000 Colen and 870 generals.
We had a great commander in WWII, Dwight Eisenhower. He became President, and on leaving the White House in 1961 he said this:

“We must guard against the aquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disasterous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist.”

Well, Ike was right. That’s just what’s happened.

The U.S. Spends 455 billion dollars a year on the military.

Clips On New Orleans From CNN

Here are some clips from CNN that ran this afternoon (September 4, 2005).
(Hopefully I’ll get some more up tonight, but now I want to get 60 min and meet the press up first, now that these are up.)
1. The Mayor of New Orleans blaming the Bush Administration for not providing proper assistance.
(video, MP3)
2. A rescuer explaining how he doesn’t even really consider what he’s doing “a real rescue,” because he’s “just moving people languishing on their roofs to languishing on the expressway.”
(video, MP3)
3. A general overview of the situation down there. (But note that today’s 60 Minutes program** challenges the allegation that the levees broke, giving the alternative explanation that it was two or more of the city’s 2 feet thick floodwalls that actually gave way.
(video, MP3)
(**This 60 minutes includes in interview with Al Naomi, who manages Flood Control for the Army Core of Engineers.)
(video, MP3)

One Of Tom DeLay’s Scandals Covered On 60 Minutes

This is from the March 6, 2005 program of
60 Minutes.

Tom Delay vs. the Austin, TX District Attorney
Mirror of these clips

It’s really interesting to me to watch the Repubs strategy in action: break the law however you need to, challenge the laws themselves, and wait a couple years until a good judge has a chance to set things straight.
Oh yeah, don’t forget to call them an “activist judge” when they use their skill and conscience to interpret the law accordingly.
By that time, you’ve already won the election, or passed the faulty legislation, or redistricted precincts or completed whatever short term goal you were after. The courts will never, ever be able to keep up the pace after you.
In this case, DeLay is challenging what is meant by “Administrative” costs. He is being investigated for allegedly using funds for other purposes than they were legally allowed to be used.
“Administrative” uses have always meant rent, power, phone bills, etc.
According to his own brochures, he was clearly using the money for other purposes.
Note that this particular “scandal” is different from the numerous other misallocations of funds that DeLay has alredy been admonished for by a congressional ethics committee, or the other recent stuff that just surfaced about taking a vacation on a lobbyist’s wallet.

60 Minutes On the 15,000 “Uncounted” Deaths and Casualties Of The Shrub War

2 Replies

This is from the November 21, 2004 program of 60 Minutes.
This story is about the Shrub Administrations efforts to hide thousands of American deaths and casualties of this war by simply not reporting them, claiming they are “non-combat injuries.” The families of dead soldiers and shell shocked soldiers who have lost limbs/become paralyzed/will never be the same again are pretty upset about it.

The Uncounted
(
Mirror

60 Minutes Explains How Electronic Voting Machines Are Inherently Insecure

This is from the October 27, 2004 episode of 60 Minutes. (Last night)
I’m not sure why they waited so long to put this out there, but I didn’t want to waste any time bringing it to you.
It’s available as two smaller 18 MB files, and one large 37 MB file.
Sorry the reception was so bad. It’s almost as if someone was purposefully jamming the transmission. (Said wearing tinfoil had 🙂

Counting the Vote

Killer 60 Minutes Bumped By Regan Retrospective

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Man oh man am I pissed. The greatest 60 minutes ever got bumped tonight while they all got together to kiss Reagan’s butt for 60 minutes. Damn.
Listen to the show that was supposed to air tonight:

“An FBI whistleblower says that the unit translating information from terrorism suspects deliberately slowed the process; America’s power elite and Yale’s Skull and Bones Society; the frailty of fingerprint evidence.”

That FBI translation story and the skull and bones story better air next week!
Somewhere in the afterlife, Reagan is laughing…